


Hit Send

by intoapuddle



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: (briefly) - Freeform, 2019 Era (Phandom), Coming Out, Established Relationship, M/M, Pride, Religious commentary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-23 11:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19700407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intoapuddle/pseuds/intoapuddle
Summary: Dan didn’t come out at Christmas, or Mum’s birthday, or Easter Sunday, and that’s okay.





	Hit Send

“It’s alright, though. If it doesn’t happen.”

Dan mocks an offended expression and puts his hands on his hips. He pops one to the side, just to emphasise how ridiculous this is.

Phil, one the other hand, remains leaning against the door frame with not as much as a flinch at Dan’s theatrics. God, Dan wishes Phil would flinch.

“It will,” Dan says as he picks up his keys from the dresser. “Don’t worry about it.”

He puts them in his coat pocket and grabs the handle of his suitcase. He is ready to go. Phil isn’t moving an inch.

“I’m not worried,” Phil says.

He finally does _something_ , even if that something is to stand up straight and roll his shoulders back as if the conversation has been wearing on him.

“It’s fine,” he goes on and starts walking towards Dan, “whatever happens. It’s fine.”

He puts a hand on top of Dan’s fist where it’s clenched hard around the handle. His thumb brushes over the whitening knuckles. Dan releases the tight hold, just a bit, as he looks Phil in the eyes.

Dan sighs.

“I just want it to be over with,” he says.

“It’s only a couple of days,” Phil reminds him. “You can leave any time you like.”

Dan imagines a scenario in which he would have to leave early. The thought terrifies him.

Phil leans forward and Dan meets him in a soft kiss. Phil smells nice and clean and comforting.

“I’ll miss you,” Dan says once they part.

Phil smiles, but his eyes are still lined with the sadness and worry that prompted Dan to assert his position in the first place. Dan wishes Phil would just make a joke. Any joke. Even one of his terrible puns. Phil remains stoic and serious, though, and Dan just can’t have that.

“A little bit,” he adds with a wink.

Finally, a laugh that momentarily wipes that sympathetic look off Phil’s face.

“Sure,” Phil says. “You’re certain you don’t want me to come along?”

Dan nods. “Yeah.”

He isn't sure. He is bloody terrified.

They say their ‘see you laters’. Dan walks out the door before Phil can ask him again. He feels blue eyes on his back as he pushes the lift button and pretends not to notice.

-

Last time, it didn’t happen. He hadn’t felt as sure about it then, though. He was sure, when he arrived. He had assured himself over and over that this is what he needed to do to begin the new chapter of his life to start off 2019. That confidence left him the moment he stepped his foot in the door. That house still makes him feel small. It makes him want to hide. It makes him want to accommodate everyone around him and do nothing to disturb the sense of peace that still feels frail.

Dan feels that this time, too. Last time, he let the idea slip away as soon as he did. This time, it sticks with him. It nags at him in the back of his mind, constantly reminding him that this is what he should do. At any quieter moments, he tries to convince himself that _now_ is the moment to do it. Each time, he takes a steadying breath in preparation with a rush of thoughts roaring through his mind, until the moment passes and the conversation picks back up.

Dan doesn’t have to leave early, but he does anyway.

-

“It’s okay,” Phil keeps reminding him.

Dan doesn’t think it’s okay.

“You’re going for Easter Sunday, yeah?” Phil asks. “You’ll do it then.”

“In the eyes of God?” Dan chuckles. “Man, you really did let go of your faith.”

Phil rolls his eyes.

“If God exists he accepts everyone all the same,” he says.

It is said with a surprising amount of confidence. When Dan doesn’t respond immediately, Phil scoots closer and rests his arm on the back of the sofa. Dan cuddles into his side and Phil’s arm curls around his back.

Phil rarely speaks in absolutes. That’s Dan’s job. Dan says the sure thing and Phil questions it, puts a spin on it, and explains his position through an almost unsettling metaphor.

Dan could use some absolutes now, though. Even if it is about something as stupid as whether God loves gays, a worry that Dan left behind a long time ago. He doesn’t care what God thinks anyway, he just cares about how his grandmother interprets it.

“He doesn’t do a good job making sure his cult knows that,” Dan supplies.

Phil hums in response and trails his fingertips along Dan’s arm, up and down.

“I don’t know about that,” Phil says. “Things have been changing so much lately. Who’s to say that’s not an act of God?”

Dan snorts.

“All of the activists that fought for their lives in the past fifty years,” he answers bitterly.

The fingertips hesitate for a moment until they keep going in the same rhythm. How can a touch so delicate feel like so much? Like a tether, pulling Dan and Phil together despite everything.

“Yeah,” Phil says. “I’m not saying it to discredit that.”

Dan knows that. Phil just wants to offer another perspective.

A perspective that could put a stop to Dan’s fear of whether his grandmother’s love and affection for him depends on whether he is gay or not. Deep down, Dan knows it doesn't. Deep down, he remembers her as support. Whether he was singing along to the Spice Girls, or put on black eyeliner and skinny jeans, or spent every other week in Manchester with his ‘new friend’ for a year, nothing changed how she treated him. No matter how see-through his tweets or videos were, Dan’s grandma still kept bothering him with questions about how to use her phone.

That certainty is easily suppressed by fear, though. It stifles him now just like it has for the past decade.

He doesn’t come out on Easter Sunday, but he doesn’t leave early. Phil tells him that that is progress.

-

So far, the script looks like what you would read in a notebook hidden under the mattress of a teenager’s bedroom. Stories upon stories, written out without a filter. Starts and stops that don’t make sense. Each one could end with one of those “ _anyway I’m tired now bye_ ” instead of the comprehensible conclusion Dan is still working on.

It wasn’t supposed to take this long. Dan was supposed to have the family stuff taken care of at Christmas, and with that a new perspective with which he could approach the script. He doesn’t have that. All he has is time that moves too fast and a deadline that has made its way into ‘sooner’ rather than ‘later’.

Phil is in the bedroom and Dan is in the living room, but they’re both looking at the script on separate laptops. Dan stares at Phil’s google account picture where it’s circled at the top of the page, indicating his presence. Phil knows these stories. He was there when the pain was still fresh.

A comment appears next to a highlighted line.

_LOL. Please include that._

Dan chuckles. Of course Phil wants everyone to know that they’re versatile.

Dan feels most confident about the jokes, the ones that ease the severity of some of these stories. He appreciates that feedback, still. That ‘LOL’. But Phil is coming up to the part that concerns him, and Dan still isn’t sure about the wording.

A line of text appears underneath those paragraphs. Phil is typing.

_Past tense?_

Dan starts typing.

_Plausible deniability._

Phil types back.

_Love that._

Dan smiles. A red heart appears next to that line.

It doesn’t add anything to the script, but Dan decides to keep it.

-

“What if I just put them all in a Skype call together?”

Dan is panicking, he’s aware of that. If his grandma can’t work out how to open Facebook without his assistance, her working out how to be there for a Skype call would be a miracle.

“Dan,” Phil says.

“Or Facetime?” Dan suggests. “Nana knows Facetime.”

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, running his hands through his hair. He can’t see the expression on Phil’s face but he imagines that it is one of exasperation.

“Why do you want to keep making it harder for yourself?”

Dan snaps his head around. Phil is resting comfortably against the pillow against the headboard, one arm casually resting at the top of his head, the position revealing the soft hairs on his armpit. Dan groans.

“You got any better ideas?” Dan asks.

It sounds like a rhetorical question, but at this point Dan would take anyone’s advice.

“Email,” Phil says.

Dan glares at him. Phil glares back. Then Dan laughs.

“Email?” he repeats, astounded.

“Yup,” Phil nods. “You get to work out how you want to tell them and you can change the wording any way you want to before you send it. And they’ll all see it all at once. And they get to consider how to respond for longer as well.”

Dan winces.

“You don’t always want to see the initial response,” Phil says. “Trust me.”

Dan sighs. Phil is right. Phil has experience. Still, Dan has never really had to see a reaction. Part of him wants to subject himself to it. He wants to prove to himself that he can be strong even in the face of adversity.

That feels too heavy to go on a tangent on right now, though. So Dan smirks.

“You need to trim your armpit hair,” he says.

Phil glances at the hair in his armpit, at the way it has started to curl, and puts his arm back down to hide it from view.

“Hey!”

Dan grins and crawls back up to him. He moves Phil’s arm back up over his head and stares.

“I’m joking,” he says, and then he leans down, inhaling hard.

Phil’s face turns pink as he laughs and pushes Dan off him.

“Did you just smell my armpit?” he asks, covering his mouth as he giggles.

“We’ve done weirder things,” Dan says, even though he has to clutch his stomach as the muscles contract with his laughter.

“You got an armpit kink?” Phil asks, moving towards Dan until he’s leaning over him, one hand at either side of his head to keep himself up.

Dan grins. “You smell good.”

“You’re weird,” Phil says.

Phil says it with disdain, but the way he kisses Dan immediately after makes it feel like a compliment. Dan puts his hands on the back of Phil’s head before he pulls away, just to keep his mouth on him for a little bit longer.

They’ve moved to sit side by side in bed with their laptops on their laps and an episode of _Friends_ running on the TV in the background when Phil glances at Dan’s screen. Dan exhales, putting a period at the end of the sentence he’d been typing. Phil does a double-take.

“What are you writing?” he asks.

Dan tilts his laptop to show Phil the screen.

“That email you went on about,” he answers.

“Went on about,” Phil mumbles, clearly disagreeing.

He shuts up while he reads it.

_Hello gang_

_I’ve been meaning to talk to you all for a while, something quite important that should be disclosed at some point. I thought I would around Christmas, then Mum’s birthday, then last Easter Sunday etc but every time I meant to, I either felt like I would ruin the mood of the day or I just felt awkward and didn’t want to._

_So I decided just to email you all instead which is really inappropriate and just weird, but that somehow seems appropriate for me and at least I’ll just finally say it._

_Basically I’m gay._

_I have a boyfriend. Yes, it’s who you think it is._

_(It’s Phil)_

“It’s good,” Phil says without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Yeah?” Dan asks. “It’s not weird?”

“It’s you,” Phil says.

He smiles at Dan, and Dan feels loved.

“I guess it is,” he says.

Dan wants to rewind, to get more time to think about it, and tell them over Easter Sunday instead. Or Mum’s birthday. Or, what he wants most of all, at Christmas.

But he can’t. All he can do is hit send. He unceremoniously clicks the button and it’s gone. Out of his hands, out of his mind, no longer his to deal with.

A laugh track plays from the TV. Dan and Phil share a look that makes them both laugh. Neither of them have to mention the irony in that to communicate it.

Before Dan puts his phone away for the night, he adds a new line to his notes.

_”I’ve come to terms with who I am and now you have to, too.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3
> 
> tumblr post | likes and reblogs are appreciated!


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